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WRITING

Don’t Follow All the Medium Advice You Read

Including the advice I’m about to give . . . well, maybe mine

Janice Macdonald

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November, southern France

I started writing on Medium in November 2021. Nothing was going very well with my writing projects. After waiting almost a year to hear from a book editor, I got the word that she’d rejected the book. I know all the advice about not giving up, but I was ready to give up.

Why not? I was living in the south of France, I had a new partner I enjoyed spending time with and I could think of a lot more enjoyable things to do than write books destined for rejection. I don’t even remember how I came across a Medium article about writing — I’d never even heard of Medium — but I read on anyway. Anything not to write.

The author of the piece had just committed to writing one article a day on the Medium platform for an entire year. It was November, NaNoWriMo month when a lot of people in the writing community were blogging about a different commitment, this one to finish a 50,000-word book.

Having just had a book, 75,000 words rejected, I wasn’t interested in that particular challenge, but the idea of writing a short piece every day was sort of interesting. As discouraging as writing frequently is, it’s also very difficult to stay away from it. And since the Medium…

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Janice Macdonald
Janice Macdonald

Written by Janice Macdonald

At 68, I started a new chapter in my life: I moved to France. Alone. It turned out to be quite the page-turner. Still is — even when age insists on a part.

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